. PUTNAM'S ORATION 



'UTN. 



ORE THE 



Till BETA KAPPA SOCIETY. 



/ jr — — -— ~ 




AN 




ORATION 



DELIVERED AT CAMBRIDGE, 



BEFORE 



THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY 



IN 






HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 



AUGUST 29, 1844. 



By"~GEORGE PUTNAM. 



*r 



BOSTON: 

CHARLES C. LITTLE AND JAMES BROWN. 

1844. 



"S 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1844, 

By Little and Brown, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



mm ^r 






boston: 

PRINTED BY FREEMAN AND BOLLES, 
WASHINGTON STREET. 



ORATION. 



Mr. President, and Gentlemen : 

We meet here to-day as scholars, at least to 
remind ourselves that we once studied, and began to 
be scholars. With many of us, indeed, our scholar- 
ship is little more than a subject of remembrance. 
The cares of the world have engrossed us, and the 
prizes of life have taken us captive. The vows 
which we vowed to Minerva in our youth, we have 
redeemed in our age at the shrine of far other gods, 
whose names are unknown in the Olympian calendar. 
However this may be, we have still an interest in 
the cause of good letters. It is to be presumed that 
the liberal studies and literary associations of our 
early days have somewhat shaped our ends in life, 
and shed an abiding influence over the most unclas- 
sic of our pursuits. We are debtors for life to the 
intellectual training which we received here. To- 
day we come to acknowledge it. For the day, at 
least, we drop all other interests, and are scholars 
again. It is fit, then, that we consider together of 
matters pertaining to sound learning and intellectual 
culture, its relations and its conditions. And in that 



4 

part of the exercises of the occasion which has fallen 
to me, I could not answer it to myself should 1 do 
less than present what I regard as the highest of those 
relations and the most vital of those conditions ; and 
these are of a moral nature. My subject, therefore, is 
The Connection between Intellectual and Moral Cul- 
ture ; between Scholarship and Character, Literature 
and Life. 

Pardon the professional bias, if it be one, which 
leads to this choice. I know I am not placed here 
to moralize, nor do I intend to preach. Here and 
now let intellectual interests stand foremost in our 
regards. We will take counsel for these. Let intel- 
lect be recognized as king in man. Let virtue step 
down from the throne, and put off the crown with 
which God has invested her, and take the place of 
handmaid to her vassal. Sovereign as she is, she is 
the willing servant of all in her realm, and delighteth 
to minister. 

My position is, that there are moral conditions on 
which the best and healthiest intellectual culture de- 
pends ; that the intellect needs nourishment and 
guidance from those ideas and affections, which have 
conscience for their centre, and duty and virtue for 
their object, and recognized spiritual relations for a 
deep, substantial basis ; that the moral elements of 
character are necessary to the truest, most desirable 
success in study and literature. 

This position I would illustrate and maintain — not 
now for righteousness' sake, but for the sake of the 
intellect. 



And to state at once the highest point of connection 
between moral and intellectual attainment — the love 
of Truth. Truth is the one legitimate object of all 
intellectual endeavor. To discover and apprehend 
truth, to clear up and adorn it, to establish, and pre- 
sent and commend it, — these are the processes 
and the ends of study and literature. To discern the 
things that really are and how they are, to distinguish 
reality from appearance and sham, to know and de- 
clare the true in outward nature, in past time, in the re- 
sults of speculation, in consciousness and sentiment, — 
this is the business of educated mind. Logic and 
the mathematics are instruments for this purpose, and 
so is the imagination just as strictly. A poem, a 
play, a novel, though a work of fiction, must be true 
or it is a failure. Its machinery may be unknown to 
the actual world ; the scene may be laid in Elysian 
fields, or infernal shades, or fairy land ; but the law of 
truth must preside over the work ; it must be the ve- 
hicle of truth, or it is nought and is disallowed. The 
Tempest, the Odyssey, and Paradise Lost, derive their 
value from their truth ; and 1 say this not upon utili- 
tarian principles, but according to the verdict which 
every true soul passes upon them, consciously or 
unconsciously. Lofty, holy truth, made beautiful and 
dear and winning to the responsive heart, — this is 
their charm, their wealth, their immortality. There 
is no permanent intellectual success but in truth at- 
tained and brought home to the eye, the understand- 
ing, or the heart. 

And for the best success in the pursuit of any ob- 



6 

ject, there must be a love of the object itself. The 
student, the thinker, the author, who is true to his 
vocation, loves the truth which he would develop 
and embody. Not for bread, not for fame, primarily, 
he works. These things may come, and are wel- 
come ; but truth is higher and dearer than these. 
Great things have been done for bread and fame, but 
not the greatest. Plato, pacing the silent groves of 
the academy, and Newton sitting half a day on his 
bedside, undressed, and his fast unbroken, rapt in a 
problem of fluxions ; Dante solacing the bitterness 
of exile with the meditations that live in the Comme- 
dia, and Bacon taking his death-chill in an experi- 
ment to test the preserving qualities of snow ; Cuvier, 
a lordlier Adam than he of Eden, naming the whole 
animal world in his museum, and reading the very 
thoughts of God after him in their wondrous mechan- 
ism ; Franklin and Davy wresting the secrets of na- 
ture from their inmost hiding-place ; Linnaeus stu- 
dying the flora of the arctic circle in loco ; and that 
fresh old man who startles the clefts of the Rocky 
Mountains with his rifle, to catch precisely the lus- 
trous tints of beauty in the plumage of a bird ; — these 
men, and such as they, love truth, and are consecrate, 
hand and heart, to her service. The truth, as she 
stands in God's doings, or in man's doings, or in those 
thoughts and affections that have neither form nor 
speech, but which answer from the deep places of the 
soul — truth, as seen in her sublimities or her beau- 
ties, in her world-poising might or her seeming trivi- 
alities — truth as she walks the earth embodied in 



visible facts, or moves among the spheres in the mys- 
terious laws that combine a universe and spell it to 
harmony, or as she sings in the upper heavens the 
inarticulate wisdom which only a profound religion 
in the soul can interpret — truth, in whichsoever 
of her myriad manifestations, she has laid hold of 
their noble affinities, and brought their being into 
holy captivity ; — such men have loved her greatly 
and fondly ; the soul of genius is always pledged to 
her in a single-hearted and sweet affiance, or else it 
is genius baffled, blasted and discrowned. 

It has been remarked by a recent critic, what 
indeed has been often said, that the eighteenth cen- 
tury was an age of insincerity and doubt, of plausi- 
bilities and spiritual paralysis. This is sweeping, but 
we know how to take it. It describes a large portion 
of the intellectual activity of that period — that por- 
tion of which Voltaire may be taken as the represent- 
ative. This man, half a century ago, occupied the 
intellectual throne of Europe, with that sort of sove- 
reignty of which, when it is legitimate, death does 
not despoil the possessor. But that sovereignty no 
longer vests in him or his line. His works are no 
longer held to be of the living and law-giving sort, 
either at home or abroad. Out of France, some of 
his volumes are much used as text-books, for learning 
a language of which, as to style, they are amongst 
the best specimens ; and at home large editions are 
still published, as, of course, the man who has so 
recently occupied the largest space in French literary 
history cannot be ignored. No educated French- 



8 

man can afford to be ignorant of what such a man 
has said and done, and no French library could ven- 
ture to call itself a library, without its department for 
Voltaire. Still he is not read as living and ruling 
minds are read. His histories are not referred to as 
authorities, but have become notorious rather for 
their perversion, careless or fraudulent, of dates and 
facts. His name, we are assured, is hissed, when 
quoted by the Historical Professor in the lecture- 
rooms of Paris. His poetry, with all its artistic per- 
fection, is no fountain of inspiration or spiritual 
refreshment to anybody ; and the highest French 
critics, with all their national feeling, have ceased to 
glory in the Henriade. His dramas, which are his 
best things, will probably be retained on the stage 
for some time longer, on account of the felicity of 
their literary execution and dramatic adaptation. 
His batteries against religion, that bristled once so 
fierce and formidable, are dismantled, and that beyond 
repair. His philosophical speculations have scarcely 
a place of refuge left them, except in a few crum- 
bling chateaux of the French provinces, where some 
octogenarian survivors of a graceless era still mutter 
in the ears of an unheeding world the last things they 
learned — the denials of infidelity and the dogmas of 
jacobinism. 

Why is all this so ? Why has it turned out thus 
with that great man, so brilliant in wit, of gifts so 
varied, an intellectual activity and productiveness so 
immense, and an influence so wide and triumphant ? 
Considering the position he once held, and the power 



he once exercised, it is not too much to say, that 
Voltaire has come to nought. And why ? His defi- 
ciencies were, no doubt, many and radical. But one 
just reason, and a comprehensive one, is, that the law 
of Truth was not in him. It is not merely because 
there was error in many of his opinions ; this must 
happen to all — to common men and great men. 
Errors of opinion will not sink a man, but indiffer- 
ence to truth will sink any man. It is not that he 
hated truth, or desired wickedly to propagate false- 
hood ; but he did not love and worship truth. He 
felt not the overawing divinity there is in it. He did 
not distinguish between it and the plausible and po- 
litic. He had no faith of the heart in anything. 

If he had had but a loving faith, only some touch 
of a believing spirit, he had been saved ; faith in 
anything — in God, or man, or nature ; in things 
temporal, or things eternal ; in a problem of mathe- 
matics or a Huttonian theory of the earth ; in some 
conclusion of logic, or some deep aspiration of the 
soul ; in some religion, whether of the Bible, the 
Koran, the Shaster, or of the heart ; in some priest- 
hood, whether of Papal appointment, or an inner, un- 
recognized and spiritual anointing from above ; in 
some nobleness, whether by kingly endowment, or a 
God-given patent stamped on the brow of greatness ; 
in some beauty, whether of heroic virtue or only a 
garden-flower ; only a faith, taking any direction, but 
clinging to something as true, and therefore dear 
and sacred ; — then there had been something for 
him to love and labor for — to live and die for — 



10 

for its own worth to him ; then he had been a true 
and earnest man, and his whole intellectual destiny 
changed. But this loadstar of the soul was wanting. 
He never felt its heavenward attraction. The divine 
principle was not in him, and so he was given over 
to the sway of his vanity and lightness, his spite and 
spleen, and all the pack of infirmities which his tem- 
perament and position engendered. He sinks into 
the seat of the scoffer. His genius goes out in 
mocking and contempt. His greatness is in denial. 
His power is in pulling down. Such a man, by the 
very turn of his mind, must be shallow, never pro- 
found. He seeks not the true in thought, but the strik- 
ing, the available, the effective. The first mind of 
his age, and producing vast immediate effect, revolu- 
tionizing the ways of thinking for a whole generation 
or two, he has yet added nothing to the world's stock 
of knowledge, nor originated a single idea that bears 
fruit, nor an influence whereby souls grow larger and 
richer by partaking. He is henceforth no man's 
spiritual benefactor. The young mind that should 
now choose him as its nursing father and highest 
man, would be stunted to barrenness and belittled to 
insignificance. For a great man, the first intellectual 
man of his age, this result I call failure. 

I have not spoken thus of the leading mind of the last 
century, by way of blaming Voltaire, because he was not 
more truly great, or great in a different and better way, 
nor because I desire the credit of that very equivocal 
sort of courage which dares to insult a dead lion, but 
because he furnishes the most conspicuous example 



11 

of a sort of intellectual character very prevalent at 
that period, and always extant in some degree ; a char- 
acter which so signally vitiated the culture and dimmed 
the fame of many leading minds of that period, and 
does so still in individual cases — an intellectual char- 
acter, that is, divorced from that great moral element, 
the love of truth ; — for I think it is to be called a 
moral element. However it may be metaphysically 
classed as to its origin, it undoubtedly derives its best 
nutriment and power, and its upward direction from 
the moral sentiments and the spiritual affinities that 
underlie them. The modern term " intellectual con- 
science " is of equivocal import and might be dispensed 
with. If it have any true meaning, it must simply 
mean the moral sense and judgment as directed to 
intellectual doings. It is the same principle in its 
essence as that which begets veracious speech in com- 
mon intercourse — makes a man true and trusty, faith- 
ful and righteous in the dealings of practical life. It 
is at bottom that which nerves men for heroic deeds 
of self-denial, wherein ease and wealth, safety and 
worldly honor, and whatever the common heart holds 
dearest, are cast behind and trodden under foot, a 
willing sacrifice for truth and the right, for kin, for 
country and mankind, for God and religion. It is the 
same divine flame that guides the honest man on the 
even tenor of his noiseless way, burns in the breast 
of the patriot, and outburns the fires that seal the 
martyr's triumph. All truth is in some sense reli- 
gious, and a hearty love and desire of any truth ele- 
vates the mind. All truth has an upward tendency. 



12 

Begin where it may — it begins anywhere and every- 
where — begin where it may, it rises from its low 
places, circles round the heart of man, soars into the 
region of spiritualities, pierces to the highest heavens, 
and culminates at last in God. A love and reverence 
for truth, in literature as in life, is a moral sentiment 
demanding a moral culture, and as such it is a prime 
condition of the best intellectual success, which it 
legitimates and ennobles. 

But further than this, not only is a love of truth as 
a moral law, a divine law, requisite to preside over all 
intellectual activity ; but in some departments of lite- 
rature, moral culture is necessary, because the moral 
nature is itself the fountain from which the intellect 
derives its best materials. In poetry, in the higher 
spiritual philosophy, and in general the various litera- 
ture that addresses the sentiments and pertains to 
human life and experience, this is especially the case. 

It has been often remarked, that the few poems 
which stand out as the greatest, have been of a reli- 
gious character, have embodied the author's concep- 
tion of divine and eternal things, have proceeded, 
that is, from a conjunction of the highest mind with 
the highest themes. Homer, Dante, Milton, are the 
names by which the remark is verified. It is, how- 
ever, too much to say that genius must always choose 
religious subjects, or propose to itself a distinct moral 
or religious aim ; but it is not too much to say, that 
genius, whatever direction it may take, must ever 
draw its richest resources, its most living thoughts, 
from religious faith and the feelings that lie alongside 



13 

of the conscience. Those high imaginations, that 
thrill all souls, and bend them to the master's hand, 
have their birth in the holy places of the heart. It 
will be found true of the greatest poets as of the great- 
est artists, whatever the errors of their lives, that they 
have been men of an intense faith, a faith in some- 
thing that has been to them a religion, capable of an 
engrossing apprehension of the divine being and glory, 
of spiritual longings that would take the kingdom of 
heaven as by violence, and of hallowed sympathies 
that make the virtues of the pure heart the surest 
realities, the most winning beauty, and the incom- 
parable blessedness of earth. It is these conceptions 
and capabilities that have made them great and given 
them the mastery. There is always a spiritual halo 
investing great thoughts. There is ever a moral 
beauty underlying all true beauty. Whatever has 
deeply moved us, has, unconsciously perhaps, but 
really, stirred the fountain of the moral emotions. 
Genius is not mere sensibility, but it is ever debtor to 
the heart, and without riches there it is a beggar and 
a starveling. Great thoughts, like great purposes, 
spring generally out of the emotions. The heart sees 
quicker, farther, higher than the head. Imagination 
is no substitute for feeling ; it can but reproduce, 
diversify and combine what is or has been an inner 
experience. He who would move me, must himself 
be moved, or must have been moved, with the same 
emotions. The poet must feel ; and to be a great 
poet, a permanently successful one, he must feel the 
reality and force of those truths, which the heart of 



14 

the world bears witness to as the most profound and 
the most elevating, and these are of a spiritual line- 
age and a moral nature. He must feel these in- 
tensely. Write about what he will, these must glow 
along his track and permeate his work. He may say 
nothing about them ; he may hide them, perhaps he 
had better ; he may be scarcely conscious of them — 
but they must be there, a living soul, a heavenly bap- 
tism, a benignant spell, which criticism may not de- 
fine, but which the souls of mankind by their own 
mystic chemistry will detect and respond to. Name 
your great poets, whether in prose or verse, and 
whatever else may be in their works, things to excite 
pleasure or disgust, admiration or contempt, or both, 
yet if the world has accepted and sealed them as great, 
and taken them to its heart, you shall find thoughts 
that make you a better and a higher being ; thoughts 
that lift you to your God, or knit you to your brother ; 
that abate your baser tendencies, and brings out your 
nobler ; that soothe you to placid repose, or spur you 
to a braver struggle and hardy endeavors — influences 
that purify your affections and stir your energies, that 
quicken your perception of the good and fair, and 
make Duty a more venerable and lovely thing. Works 
that are merely brilliant, or merely amusing, evincing 
only dexterity and smartness in the author, appealing 
only to the sensual, the superficial and the transient 
in human experience, such works have their day of 
popularity, but the flood of time passes over them and 
they are not. 

Profound moral experiences are accordingly requi- 



15 

site for the best success in literature. To extend and 
deepen, to refine and exalt these, is a part of the cul- 
ture of genius for genius' sake — a part which it is 
fatal to omit. It seems to be the privilege of genius, 
perhaps the thing that makes it genius, to be natu- 
rally endowed with high spiritual conceptions and an 
unusual share of the moral affinities, affections and 
aspirations. When the true poet is born, the soul of 
goodness is born in him. But as if Providence would 
equalize its favors, it seems to have rendered it pecu- 
liarly difficult for him to maintain his birthright, and 
keep it from contamination and decay. There is but 
one embodiment in which the soul of goodness in 
man can live and grow, and that is, a character, 
practical life, the deeds and traits that conform to the 
generous inspirations. It is its law that it shall be so 
embodied, or else die out of the heart. The man of 
genius is prone to forget or defy this law. Actual 
character and the daily household virtues are for 
common men, he thinks. It is his glory to shape his 
visions of the divine into the " thoughts that breathe 
and the words that burn." He may win others to the 
beautiful, the noble and the true, and " reck not his 
own read." The homely virtues, without which the 
world must go asunder, he, from his mount of vision, 
may set aside as the cramped conventionalities which 
the free spirit spurns and is released from. He may 
follow impulses for laws, the basest as well as the 
holiest, and make, unblamed, 

" such wanton, wild, and usual slips 



As are companions, noted and most known 
To youth and liberty." 



16 

But it will not do. He braves a law that is higher 
and stronger than he, and he must take the retribu- 
tion. " Take the talent from him," is the edict gone 
forth from the foundation of the world. His soul 
must dwindle, his inspiration fade away, his percep- 
tions of the first fair, first good, grow strained and dim. 

" Great thoughts, great feelings, that came to him 
Like instincts, unawares," 

come dwarfed and fewer. The light goes gradually 
out within him. Earth-born passions displace the 
angel-guards that would have kept him, and base 
alloy overlays the gold and jewels with which his 
Maker endowed and adorned him at his birth. He 
may play the poet, but he has outraged his poet na- 
ture, and his wand is broken. Sincerity is gone, and 
with it the true fire of his genius and his hold on the 
heart of the world. 

I know there are apparent exceptions, but I believe 
they are apparent only. A most remarkable, an al- 
most miraculous one, presents itself in the case of that 
great man who has so long held the sceptre which 
fell from the withered hand of Voltaire, the German 
Goethe. If we may venture to dissent from the idol- 
atrous panegyrics of some of his European and Amer- 
ican admirers, and may abide by the more detailed 
accounts and calmer judgments that reach us from 
the great man's own country, and which we are as- 
sured prevail there — with some contradiction indeed, 
but a contradiction growing fainter every day, — then 
we may look upon Goethe as the impersonation of 



17 

moral indifference. A gentleman and a courtier, he 
made his elegant Epicureanism conform to the decen- 
cies and graces of the polished and even elevated 
society in which he moved, or which, perhaps we 
ought to say, moved round him as its centre. He 
knew how to win the regard, perhaps even the affec- 
tion, of men far better than himself. But he was re- 
markably destitute of moral sympathies, and seems to 
have recognized no such thing as moral obligation. 
He was cold, selfish, false. Throughout Germany 
his name is almost a synonyme for dissoluteness. Of 
course, both there and here, kindred spirits have a 
vocabulary by which they can make a very light mat- 
ter of his heartless profligacy. They think it imper- 
tinent to call his vices by their right names and make 
them an element in the judgment to be passed upon 
so great a man. But both there and here, those per- 
sons to whose apprehension the moral law is a real- 
ity, and moral purity a trait of at least equal dignity 
with poetic talent, will adhere to their old-fashioned 
notions, even though the character of Goethe himself 
be in question. With them blackness must stand as 
black, and be called black. The vices which involve 
treachery and cold-blooded trifling with the peace 
and virtue of others, are of the sort which there is 
least occasion to palliate for charity's sake. With the 
eye of an artist, and the unruffled equanimity of pro- 
found self-love, he could calmly survey the ruin he 
had wrought in the hearts that confided in him. He 
derived material for poetry from sufferings which he 
had himself wantonly caused, and one can hardly 



18 

avoid the impression, that he inwardly felicitated him- 
self upon the rich accession to his artistic domain 
furnished by such precious experiences. If this is 
harsh judgment upon Goethe, the voice of his coun- 
try is answerable for it, and not I. 

And yet this bad man — why should I hesitate at 
the expression — this bad man, we are assured by the 
initiated, was the first poet of his time. " All that we 
mean," it has been said, " by the higher literature of 
Germany, which is the higher literature of the world, 
gathers round this man as its creator." He knew 
how to touch the springs of thought and feeling, more 
in number, more skilfully and more potently than any 
man in the two generations which his lifetime cover- 
ed. He could deal like a master with the highest 
spiritualities, and hold a mirror to the holiest moral 
capabilities hidden in the recesses of the soul. So 
say his admirers, and they are too many and strong 
to be flatly contradicted yet. 

So then this false man has succeeded as a true 
poet ! Must I then surrender my position ? No, not 
for a hundred Goethes. He has not succeeded defin- 
itively as a true poet of the highest order. It is too 
soon to affirm that point settled in his favor against 
so much contradiction. The sharpness and marvel- 
lous reach of his intellectual eye, the breadth of his 
understanding, the compass of his imagination, and 
his consummate skill in literary execution, none will 
deny. And he had a power, altogether unapproached 
by any other man, to supply by imagination, observa- 
tion and appropriation, those moral elements, or the 



19 

semblance of them, which could have had no vital 
being within himself, except as the reminiscences of 
blessed susceptibilities that must have graced his 
spirit in its youth. 

His power and skill in this, as in other things, are 
wonderful. That is, he was a great, an unequalled 
Artist, — Artist, that is the term everywhere applied 
to him — a term which, as applied to literary men, I 
am sorry to find is getting into some repute amongst 
us as a term of commendation. In Europe it is 
generally a term of disparagement, as indicating a 
writer whose inspiration passes not through the heart, 
and whose lofty sentiments have no home in his own 
soul, and no expression in his life. 

Goethe is an artist — only that, though so great. I 
think he will not always be put foremost among the 
true and noble poets. He was not a true man, and 
therefore cannot stand there. Already, though still 
in the zenith of his glory, it is widely felt that he is in 
some sense a splendid impostor. The radical defi- 
ciency in him is beginning to be discerned. It is 
found that, after all, he is not the man who reaches 
the holy of holies in the soul ; that though he dazzles 
he does not warm, though he stirs he does not exalt ; 
that he is no priest of God. Already the German 
heart is setting itself right in the matter. It takes, 
not Goethe, but Schiller for its idol. Its love and 
enthusiasm run to Schiller, the true man, the earnest, 
whole-souled man, whose great, glowing heart only 
just pours forth its own inbred emotions and aspir- 
ings ; the man, to whom a generous affection, and a 



20 

noble conception and aim, is no mere scientific and 
available fact, but a vital experience, an inmost and ab- 
sorbing reality, gushing from his soul for very fulness. 
It is his name, his history, his poetry, not Goethe's, 
that makes the German eye glisten, and the German 
breast heave with fond enthusiasm and exalting sym- 
pathies. It is so ; it must and ought to be so ; it 
will be so more and more, there and everywhere. 
The world will not separate the man from his works, 
because he cannot separate himself from them. The 
identity, though disguised for a time, will appear. 
Though his biography were never written, nor his 
name divulged, it will appear, and both he and his 
works go to their own place. The spider cannot 
spin the silkworm's cocoon, though his separate 
threads may look as fine and bright in the sunshine 
for a while. The false cannot stand in place of the 
true. Whenever and in whomsoever the artist out- 
runs the man, time will outrun them both, and run 
them down. When Goethe, and such as he, shall 
have come to be admired and studied only by the 
few for purposes of a peculiar artistic culture, Schil- 
ler, and such as he, will still be making their way 
from heart to heart, blessing and being blessed, and 
calling forth glad and lofty responses from all that is 
noble in human souls throughout the world. 

The poetic success of Lord Byron is a problem of 
less difficult solution than that of Goethe, for he had 
a heart ; and though he blasted it by vice, and let it 
freeze and shrivel in skepticism and misanthropy, yet 



21 

it had had time for some full-toned, generous beats , 
enough to account for the scattered gleams of heav- 
enly light that irradiate the mass of sensuality, and 
the few really true and noble passages which relieve 
the brilliant but monotonous waste of extravagance 
and passion. 

It is not easy to say whether Byron's success arose 
from what is good or what is bad in his works. 
Partly from both, I suppose ; and from the vividness 
of fancy and energy of expression that appear in both. 
If his popularity has arisen from those qualities and 
those parts of his works which minister to diseased 
fancies and depraved tastes, and to the sullen, reck- 
less, man-hating, God-denying moods and periods of 
the unbalanced mind ; or which, in the best view of it, 
satisfy the irregular craving for strong excitement 
and bedazzlement of any and every sort, a craving so 
common for a brief season in the ardor of youth, — if 
Byron's popularity rests here, then it must cease to 
be fame. He will be read abundantly on this ground. 
But the books which men delight in in their worst 
moments and their unwisest periods of culture, and 
put away whenever they awake to the consciousness 
of a better nature, such books are not pronounced 
great and noble even by them, the delighted. 

Or, on the other hand, if it be what is pure and 
exalted in Byron's poetry, that has won the wreath 
for him, then what a comment we have on my doc- 
trine, that true and high inspirations can retain their 
force and elevation only as embodied in personal 
character. For how transiently did they flash and 



22 

glimmer in Byron ; how quick and mournfully did 
they fade out. He died at the age of thirty-six — a 
wasted and broken-down old man before his prime. 
And even then, so early, he had nearly outlived the 
holy aspirations that visited him so invitingly in his 
youth. He had lived a traitor to the rich endow- 
ments of his genius, and all but their husk was gone. 
His muse, never well wonted to the upper sky, had 
sunk irredeemably into the earthy mire of Juanism, 
and only with spasmodic and ineffectual efforts essay- 
ed to lift its daggled wing from the slough, or cast a 
glance of its rheumy eye to the empyrean which it 
had forfeited. Do we call that success for such a son 
of the morning, as Byron by his gifts was commis- 
sioned to be, but would not ? Is that intellectual suc- 
cess — for him ? 

I must advert to one other point of connection be- 
tween literature and morality, though perhaps I have 
already anticipated it. I mean the necessity of the 
latter simply as the conservative principle among the 
mixed and conflicting elements that compose a human 
being — the guiding, steadying principle. Moral cul- 
ture is needed to furnish that law of life, that energy 
and wise direction of the will, that self-control, which 
is as necessary in literary as in all other pursuits, to 
the man of genius as to the man of common sense. 

A disposition is manifested in modern criticism, to 
treat with special leniency the moral infirmities and 
errors of men of genius ; to allow everything for the 
temperament of genius, as being ill-suited to bear re- 



23 

straint, and privileged, in consideration of its extraor- 
dinary gifts, to have its own wild way in morals. 
This disposition is worthy of all praise, so far as it 
proceeds from holy charity, and that compassionate 
sympathy, which is the only feeling we ever ought to 
cherish towards those whose frailties we all partake 
of. Yes, be lenient, spare all denunciation. Never- 
theless, it is not to be forgotten that the moral law 
extends its jurisdiction over such men, as over all. 
They, too, must keep it, or they perish. So God 
has ordained. There are no exempts in that service. 
Retribution will follow the transgressor, though we 
spare all reproach ; — that will follow him, be he 
poet or peasant or both. It is the eternal, adaman- 
tine law. 

Perhaps there is no instance in literary history, in 
which so much forbearance has been bespoken and 
exercised as in that of Burns. And never, surely, 
lived the man with more winning claims to all gentle 
speech and feeling. No man, with a human heart in 
him, can ever feel anything but admiration for the 
genius of Burns, and pity for his failings and the at- 
tendant ruin. But the truth of the case should be 
stated sometimes. It will do him no harm in his 
grave, and it is instructive. Burns was a victim of 
intemperance. The truth is — one cannot connect 
so foul a word with so fair a spirit, without reluctant 
misgivings — but the simple truth is, that he became 
a drunkard. He struggled bravely, and for a long 
time against the fatal tendency ; but it mastered him 
at last. His constitution gave way under his excesses ; 



24 

and finally, a tavern debauch and the subsequent 
hours spent in the street, of a cold night, gave the 
finishing blow, and that sun went down at noon. It 
is usual to cover up this unpleasant fact under deli- 
cate and kindly allusions to his genial disposition and 
festive propensities ; and this is well, and in good 
taste. Still it is simply and sadly so, that drunken- 
ness ruined him in life, and caused his premature 
death at the age of thirty-seven. It is not easy, nor 
is it pleasant, to look through the halo that invests the 
name of this sweet minstrel, and behold him in his 
degradation, just such an object as we turn from with 
disgust in the streets and foul haunts of our own cities. 
But I suppose he was, sometimes, no more nor less 
than just that. It is usual to apologize for Burns, by 
referring to the ardor of a poetic temperament, his 
unfavored lot, the ill-usage or neglect of an unappre- 
ciating world. Be it so ; I suppose there is always 
something — in temperament or circumstances, tempt- 
ation of some sort — that leads to such a fall and end. 
We would always apologize, as well as we can, for 
the errors and weaknesses of a fallen brother. But 
not for Burns in particular, or for such as he — not 
for him more than others. There is much charity 
felt for the errors of men of genius, which is not of 
the Christian stamp, but rather of a morbid and 
squeamish sort. Let us have unbounded charity for 
them, but let it be true and manly ; full of compas- 
sion and forgiveness, and with no pharisaic self-com- 
placency, and yet not such as to annihilate moral dis- 
tinctions, or put them out of sight. Men of genius 



25 . 

are not a class by themselves ; they are not exempt 
from God's laws and the conditions of humanity ; nor 
entitled to be fools without the ungracious name. 
This or that man of genius, forsooth, is not appreci- 
ated by the world immediately ; men cannot under- 
stand and do not meet his real wants ; his employ- 
ments are not exactly such as befit the gods ; he is not 
taken up and made altogether comfortable. Alas, 
when will it be, that men generally, common or un- 
common ones, will be made perfectly comfortable, 
and have all circumstances just right? But he is 
not well situated or well treated, and so he is entitled 
to say, — O, ungrateful world, I will go mad, I will 
get drunk, I will go hang myself. Go, then, says the 
world, calmly, though compassionately ; go, if you 
will and must. The common neighborly charities of 
life are supposed to wait on every man in the time of 
trouble, be he poet or otherwise. But it is not the 
world's business to run up and down, seeking after 
genius in discontent and distress — to study out the 
appliances that will make it perfectly comfortable in 
its misfortunes or its caprice. No ; it is demanded 
of every man by his fellow-men, by his own soul and 
his God, that he shall have and show some self-help, 
self-sufficiency, power to buffet with difficult and dis- 
agreeable things, and acquire some of that hardy 
manliness, which, be he poet or pedler, will forever be 
the best part of him — of more worth than all his 
wares, whether of tape and needles or of ode and epic. 
The man of genius is no exception. It is demanded 
of him too, and rightfully, that he also be a man, and 

4 



26 

cheerily fight the fight and show the mettle of a man. 
Why not of him ? Is he more or less than a man ? 
If more, why should he drink sack ? Jf less, how 
should he be God's prophet and the world's teacher ? 
But, in truth, he is just man, neither more nor less ; 
and he must vindicate and hold fast the dignity of 
manhood in his own person, or else he must descend 
from the tripod, and the oracle in him go dumb, and 
he must sink and suffer and die like all the unfaithful. 
He is tried first, to see if he will be a thorough man, 
and if he will not be that, or when he ceases to be 
that, then the world cannot be, and God will not be, 
served by his genius any longer. He must come 
down, and become even as one of us. 

The mad exasperations, and the broken-hearted- 
ness of ill-used genius, are very affecting — more so, 
perhaps, than the same things in common men ; but 
they will not pass. They make folly no wiser, nor 
weakness more dignified, nor sin more stingless, nor 
judgment more slack or more evitable. 

It is a plain matter. There is a law over all men, 
over the gifted and the giftless alike ; and its first 
command is, Take care of thyself; rule over thine 
own body and soul. Rule them by reason and con- 
science. Do this, or thou shalt surely die. Let the 
world go with thee as it will, do this. Do this first ; 
this at any rate. Do this as the prime condition of 
everything else thou wouldst do. Do this, or thou 
shalt do nothing but wrestle with thy ruin, vainly — 
vainly, though thy gifts be such as the angels covet. 

As I have said these ungracious things in connex- 
ion with a name so honored and endeared as that of 



27 

Burns, let me further say, in justice to him, that he 
never canted in the godless sophistries of fatalism ; 
he never pleaded temperament and circumstance 
against the clear behests of virtue. Others do it for 
him, but not he. His will succumbed to his passion, 
but his moral judgments were not perverted. He 
knew well his own debasement, and its shame and 
guilt. In gloom and remorse he bent his noble head 
before the destroyer he had courted, and yielded 
himself to the inexorable retribution. That ode 
addressed to Ruin — not Death, peace-giving death, 
but stern, unsolaced Ruin — it came from his heart 
of hearts. 

" All hail ! inexorable lord ! 

At whose destruction-breathing word 

The mightiest empires fall ! 
Thy cruel, woe-delighted train, 
The ministers of grief and pain, 

A sullen welcome all ! 
• • • t 

And thou, grim power, by life abhorred, 
While life a pleasure can afford, 

Oh ! hear a wretch's prayer ! 
No more I shrink, — appalled, afraid 
I court, I beg, thy friendly aid 

To close this scene of care ! " 

Dear bard ! thou creature of all ethereal essences, 
heart's brother of us all, in so much that is frailest 
and so much that is holiest within us, we draw thee 
to our bosoms with a fond love and a tender pity, 
and all the more for the sins and griefs that crushed 
thy great heart. Nevertheless, we will read the 
dreadful lesson, and note the fearful warning, and 
remember the irreversible law. 



28 

I have left myself but little space for another 
branch of our general subject, which, however, must 
not be wholly passed by. It is, the relation of 
moral character to intellectual attainment and influ- 
ence as exercised in the practical affairs of the 
world. The wants of our time and country, the 
constitution of our modern society, our whole posi- 
tion — personal and relative — forbid a life of mere 
scholarship or literary pursuits to the great majority 
of those who go out from our colleges. No learned 
seclusion, no 

" Segregation 
From open haunts and popularity," 

is permitted to the most of us. However it may 
have been in other times, and other lands, here and 
now, but few of our educated men are privileged 

" From the loopholes of retreat 
To look upon the world, to hear the sound 
Of the great Babel, and not feel its stir." 

Society has work for us, and we must forth to 
do it. Full early and hastily we must gird on the 
manly gown, gather up the loose leaves and scanty 
fragments of our youthful lore, and go out among 
men, to act with them and for them. It is a prac- 
tical age, and our Wisdom, such as it is, " must 
strive and cry, and utter her voice in the streets, 
standing in the places of the paths, crying in the 
chief place of concourse, at the entry of the city, and 
the coming in at the doors." 

This state of things, though not suited to the tastes 
and qualities of all, is not, on the whole, to be regret- 



29 



ted by educated men as such. It is not in literary 
production only or chiefly, that educated mind finds 
fit expression, and fulfils its mission in honor and be- 
neficence. In the great theatre of the world's affairs 
there is a worthy and a sufficient sphere. Society 
needs the well-trained, enlarged and cultivated intel- 
lect of the scholar in its midst ; needs it and wel- 
comes it and gives it a place, or by its own capacity 
it will take a place, of honor, influence and power. 
The youthful scholar has no occasion to deplore the 
fate that is soon to tear him from the delicice litera- 
rum, the nodes ccenceque deorum, and cast him into 
the swelling tide of life and action. None of his dis- 
ciplinary and enriching culture will be lost or useless 
even there. Directly or indirectly everything shall 
tell there. Every hour of study, every truth he has 
reached, and the toilsome process by which he reach- 
ed it ; the heightened grace or vigor of thought or 
speech he has acquired — all shall tell fully, nobly, if 
he will give heed to the conditions. And one condi- 
tion, the prime one, is, that he be a true man, and 
recognize the obligation of a man, and go forth with 
heart and will and every gift and acquirement dedi- 
cated, lovingly and resolutely, to the true and the 
right. These are the terms, and apart from these 
there is no success, no influence to be had, which an 
ingenuous mind can desire, or which a sound and 
far-seeing mind would dare to seek. 

Indeed, it is not an easy thing, nay, it is not a pos- 
sible thing, to obtain a substantial success and an 
abiding influence, except on these terms. A facti- 
tious popularity, a transient notoriety, or in the case 



30 

of shining talents, the doom of a damning fame may 
fall to bad men. The temporary leadership of a fac- 
tion, and offices, such as are yearly tossed like a ball 
from party to party, are quite likely, in the confusion, 
to accrue to unprincipled aspirants, the gift of fortune 
or the prize of skill. But an honored name, enduring 
influence, a sun brightening on through its circuit 
more and more even to its serene setting, — this 
boon of a true success goes never to intellectual qual- 
ities alone. It gravitates slowly but surely to weight 
of character, to intellectual ability rooted in principle, 
coupled with high and disinterested aims, wedded to 
the trusty virtues of private life and devoted to the 
public welfare, and seen to be so by the steady and 
consistent tenor of many years' unswerving fidelity. 
I say not only that it ought to be so, but that it is so ; 
an indisputable fact, visible in all human history, and 
visible here and now. I do not preach the doctrine, 
but I record the fact. 

We are often told from abroad, in terms not always 
agreeable, that our literary training in this country is 
very defective ; that a high degree of intellectual cul- 
tivation is not to be expected from our systems of 
education, and seldom proceeds from them. All this 
may be true. But our greatest want lies not there. 
The want of our educated and able men is not so 
much a higher degree of intellectual cultivation ; that 
is desirable, no doubt, yet not that primarily, not that 
first or most — but principle and character, to impart 
wise direction and beneficent power to the culture 
and ability which they have. We have scholars, we 
have strongmen, eloquent men, men richly furnished, 



31 

and trained to a high mastery and use of noble gifts ; 
but how inadequate a proportion, I had almost said 
how few of them, have that purity of life and loftiness 
of purpose, which win confidence to them, and make 
them the lights in our sky and the towers of strength 
on our borders, which they are commissioned to be 
if they would. It is sad that the great intellect should 
come short of making a great man, and so be shorn 
of its glory. It is sad that our affection and respect 
cannot oftener go with our admiration. It is a sad 
sight to look upon the man of high endowments, a 
child of the muses, on whom every god of Olympus 
has smiled and bestowed gifts, whom we would lean 
upon and look to for wise guidance, and the inspira- 
tions that would lift us to generous aims and move us 
to noble deeds and lead the way, whom we would that 
we might trust as the pole-star and follow as the sun, 
and almost swear by — it seems so fit and so possible 
that it might be so, and so blessed a thing if it might, — 
it is sad, I say, that it cannot be, as so often it cannot. 
And why can it not be ? It is not from defects in 
merely intellectual training or attainment, but from 
the overweening confidence he has placed in these. 
He has valued himself upon these only. He has felt 
himself, through these, great enough to put aside the 
gentle wisdom he imbibed at a mother's knee. He 
has forgotten the time, for it is likely there was a time, 
when " his heart in its simplicity and purity conversed 
with itself and drew its desires from its own better na- 
ture." He comes to deem intellect the master ele- 
ment that makes the man. Learning, eloquence, and 
power and skill in using them, these things he vainly 



32 

thinks must ensure the true prizes of existence. He 
goes out into life, and the brilliancy of incipient suc- 
cess, and the hosannas with which the first dawn of 
genius is ever greeted, dazzle him more and mislead 
him farther. Temptation comes, and against the 
vices that taint and cripple the man he is not provid- 
ed, nor does he care to be. His aspirations, lofty 
at first, learn to bend down and shape themselves to 
the low issues which the world presents. And then 
when the vulgar ambitions of the day, for place, popu- 
larity and preferment, get possession of him, then the 
door is wide open for all the rabble rout of earthy 
passions and petty aims. He sinks into the sensualist, 
the schemer, or the demagogue. He crawls and shuf- 
fles, or towers and blusters, till all his canting of truth 
and principle, of honor and patriotism, becomes a 
mockery too shallow to pass. And then, where is the 
man ? Where and what his intellect is we know, but 
where is the man? Just where intellect, trusting 
wholly in its own gifts and culture, will always put a 
man; on an eminence indeed, to be seen and heard 
of all — but a thing for men to shake their heads at, 
distrustfully and lamentingly. Such men are to be 
found in all histories and all times — in our own his- 
tory and our own time. And they show that the de- 
fect of our systems of education consists not so much 
in the low standard of intellectual culture, as in the 
overlooking of that other culture, which is essential 
to its completeness and to the fulfilment even of 
its own issues, the attainment of its own worthy 
success. 

There are few more melancholy contrasts in life, 



33 

than that presented by the ingenuous young scholar, 
just passing into adolescence, the charm of boyhood 
yet lingering about him, generous thoughts and 
high aspirations expanding his fair brow, the fire of 
genius flashing in his soft eye, and the silvery tones 
of that young, honest eloquence, which sometimes, T 
know not how, thrills and inspires me more than all 
other human speech of the strongest or wisest — 
promise, promise, written on his glowing counte- 
nance, in letters of light, read of all beholders with a 
fond interest, and read by the parental eye and 
heart with a silent extasy of loving and exuberant 
hope, as delicious an emotion almost, I should think, 
as ever visits the breast of mortals ; the contrast, I 
say, between that youth and the same being as he is 
when a few years have flown, when he has come, I 
say not to ruin and infamy, (though that would be no 
extravagant imagination,) but down from his mount 
of transfiguration to the world's low level, when ava- 
rice has laid its gripe on him, and the common lusts 
of political and social life have mastered him, and the 
cares and passions incident to vulgar ambition have 
ploughed their unvenerable furrows in his face, and 
all that young glory is departed. " How is the gold 
become dim, and the most fine gold changed." 

Oh ! it is not a small thing to make the results of 
age correspond in beauty and dignity to the promise 
of youth. It is no ordinary career that makes the 
almond-blossoms of age as beautiful and as desirable 
as the blooming roses of youth, and the drear autumn 
of life as lustrous and fair as the sweet spring time, 
and the satisfactions of the finished race as dear as 



34 

the fresh budding hopes that brightened its begin- 
ning. That is success, and it is no light thing to win 
it. Intellect alone, genius, learning, eloquence, skill, 
industry, ambition — these alone never won it since 
the world has stood, and never will. But it can be 
won. Let principle, character, and soul accom- 
pany, pervade, and underlie these great intellectual 
instrumentalities, and it is won gloriously. 

The most dreary and awful chapter in the world's 
history would be, I suspect, that which should give a 
true and full account of the declining years, the exit 
off the stage, of highly-gifted and highly-cultivated 
minds, but unprincipled, or low-principled, and a 
career conforming. It would be an account of des- 
pondency, misanthropy, and bitter disappointment ; a 
strong man, feeling himself enslaved by contemptible 
selfishnesses, and scourged and hag-ridden by the 
meanest passions. It would bring to light that hun- 
gry, aching sense, which such minds must feel in- 
tensely then, of the worthlessness of what they had 
done, and the hollow ness of what they had got. It 
would tell of the unsolaced miseries of great powers 
perverted, and a privileged life wasted, if no worse. 
It would record the real failure of existence, and the 
woes that haunt the harrowing consciousness of it ; 
and yet that very failure is the success which many a 
young scholar is pressing forward to attain, as the 
worthiest object and the brightest boon. Genius and 
intellectual culture are a fiery curse, unless the mind 
be disenchanted of that delusion. 

It is a frequent inquiry, what is the scholar's true 
mission in this age and country ? What best things 



35 

shall he do, here and now ? It is a great and fruitful 
question. But I deem it quite secondary, compara- 
tively unimportant. A previous problem, and a 
harder one, is, to train scholars of such a stamp and 
stature, of such conceptions and aims, that they shall 
desire those best things — shall have a heart to do 
them. Such men lack not light to show them the 
way. 

" Virtue can see to do what virtue would, 

By her own radiant light, though sun and moon 
Were in the flat sea sunk." 

The first thing for the scholar to do — the one thing 
from which all else will follow — is to give the world 
assurance of a man. Let each scholar bring a man 
into the field of the world ; a man, with a robust and 
healthy soul in him, and he will find his work, nor 
need any to tell him. Let him bring into the com- 
mon stock of beneficent agencies, in his own person, 
a lofty, generous manhood, devoted to truth, justice, 
and humanity, and he will have done his part. The 
world wants him, not merely his intellectual gifts and 
preparations, which are but his armor, his plume, 
and his trumpet — he wants these, to make him a 
man of might and a man of mark ; but the world 
wants him, a true and living soul ; not his accoutre- 
ments but him. A true and high-toned, high-princi- 
pled man is the only legitimate and desirable result of 
scholarship. 

In the beginning of this address I said, and have 
endeavored to keep my word so far, that I would 
plead only for intellectual interests ; that virtue should 
yield her supremacy and be treated as only the ser- 



